by Les Weil
I finished Red Days some time in April. I had it typed out, top and five copies, and sent the various copies to the various State publishing firms in Moscow, Kharkov, Tiflis and Erivan, who had signed agreements for the Russian, German, Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian editions of the book. I have explained in The God that Failed that these agreements, and the considerable advance payments that went with them, were not the result of my literary reputation--which was non-existent since I had published no books at that time--but a direct effect of the strong Comintern letter that I carried. When I produced it, in Kharkov or in Erivan, the Director of the State Publishing Trust in question could not refuse signing a contract for the contemplated book, which was described as an important contribution to our fight on the Propaganda Front, without risking to be accused of sabotage. It was in this indirect manner that the Comintern financed my sojourn and travels in Soviet Russia, and similar methods were employed to oblige visiting authors from abroad who were not members of the Party. They were, of course, delighted at the news that the Usbeks, Tadziks and Eskimos were all eager to read their books, and they would have been very indignant at the suggestion that the advance payments from the various State publishing firms amounted to bribes. This is another miracle which State control over publishing can achieve.
In spite of my numerous contracts, however, only one edition of Red Days did, in fact, appear. This was the Kharkov edition in German, intended for the German-speaking national minorities in the Ukraine. It is a thin, paperbound volume, so thoroughly expurgated that less than half of the original manuscript was allowed to stand. It was published in 1934, after I had left the Soviet Union. I was never sent a presentation copy, and did not know for certain whether the book had been published or not until some thirteen years later--when an unknown American reader sent me a copy that he had picked up by chance on a tourist trip to the Soviet Union.
The Russian edition of the book which, from the point of view of a writer's prestige was the only one that really counted, never saw the daylight. Three months after I had delivered the manuscript I was informed by one of the higher bureaucrats in the Moscow Trust that it had been rejected because it was written in `a too frivolous and lighthearted style'. This was, Of course, a bitter disappointment; but at least I had not been accused of any political deviation, and my Party record remained untarnished.
At about the time when this decision was communicated to me, Paul Dietrich, my friend and immediate superior in the German section of the Comintern, informed me that the Party had decided against my staying in Russia. The leaders and intellectuals of the German C.P. who had managed to escape from the Nazi terror were all gathering in Paris which was becoming the centre of the anti-Fascist propaganda campaign, and I was instructed to join them.
Though in Russia it would have been easy to find a job, whereas in Paris I would have to start from scratch, I received the news with immense relief. I was a Communist, but I found life in Russia terribly depressing. Only now, with the prospect of departure before me, did I admit to myself how depressing it had been. The drab streets, the unrelieved shabbiness and poverty, the grim pomposity of everything said and written, the all-pervading atmosphere of a reformatory school. The feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world. The boredom of newspapers which contained nothing critical or controversial, no crime, no sensation, no gossip, sex, scandal, human interest. The constant exhortations, the stereotyped uniformity of all and everything, the eternal portrait of Big Brother following you everywhere with his eyes. The overwhelming bleakness of an industrialised Neanderthal.
... And yet I remamed a convinced Communist. I had learned that facts had to be appreciated not on their face value, but in a dynamic way. Living standards were low, but under the Czarist regeme they had been even lower. The working classes in the capitalist countries were better off than in the Soviet Union, but that was a static cotnparison, for here the level was steadily rising, there steadily falling. At the end of the second Five Year Plan the two levels would be equalised; until that time all comparisons were misleading, and bad for the Soviet People's morale. Accordingly, I not only accepted the famine as inevitable, but also the necessity of the ban on foreign travel, foreign newspapers and books, and the dissemination of a grotesquely distorted picture of life in the capitalist world. At first I was shocked when after a lecture I was asked questions like these: `When you left the bourgeois Press was your ration card withdrawn and were you kicked out at once from your room?' `What is the average number per day of French working-class families starving to death (a) in rural areas, (b) in the towns?' `By what means have our comrades in the West succeeded in temporarily staving off the war of intervention which the Monopoly-Capitalists are preparing with the aid of the Social-Fascist traitors to the working class?' The questions were always painstakingly formulated in neo-Russian Djugashwilese. After a while I found them quite natural. There was always a small element of truth in them-this had, of course, been exaggerated and simplified according to the accepted techniques (f propaganda; but propaganda was indispensable for the survival of the Soviet Union, surrounded by a hostile world.
The necessary propaganda-lie; the necessary intimidation of the masses to preserve them from error; the necessary liquidation of opposition groups and hostile social classes; the necessary sacrifice of a wholegeneration in the interest of the next-it may all sound revoltinq, and yet it was quite easy to accept while one was rolling along the single track of faith. It had all happened before, in the history of the medicrval churches, in Byzantium, in the hothouses of mystic sects; but the mental universe of the addict is difficult to understand for the outsider . . .' (The God that Failed.)
There was another consideration that helped me, and every other Communist who visited Russia, to get over the shock. It was our conviction that conditions in Russia were what they were not because of any fault in our system, but because of the backwardness of the Russian people. In Germany, in Austria or France, the Revolution would take an entirely different form. There was a saying among German Communists in Russia that could only be pronounced in a whisper: 'Wir werden es besser machen'-'we shall know better'. In other words, every Communist who had lived in the Soviet Union tor some length of time, returned to his country as a Titoist at heart.
It was this conviction that `we shall know better' that kept my faith alive. It was no longer the naive faith of a year before, when I had got into the train in Berlin expecting that it would take me straight to Utopia. It had become a rather wistful, rather esoteric faith, but all the more elastic. I no longer believed in Communism because of the Russian example, but in spite of it. And a faith that is held `in spite of' is always more resilient and less open to disillusion than one that is based on a`because'.
My last few weeks in Russia I spent in Moscow. I met a number of men in the higher Comintern and Soviet hierarchy, among them Mikhael Kolzov, Karl Radek and Nicolai Bukharin, all of whom have since met with their fate. Bukharin and Radek both made a deep impression on me, but I only met each of them once and in rather formal circumstances, so that I cannot trust my memory to describe them. Besides, I have incorporated certain characteristic features of both Radek and Bukharin into the 'Rubashov' of Darkness at Noon, and after all these years I am quite incapable of disentangling the features of the original models from the composite imaginary frgure.
They were all tired men. The higher you got in the hierarchy, the more tired they were. I have nowhere seen such exhausted men as among the higher strata of Soviet politicians, among the Old Bolshevik guard. It was not only the effect of overwork, nervous strain and apprehension. It was the past that was telling on them, the years of conspiracy, prison and exile; the years of the famine and the Civil War; and sticking to the rules of a game that demanded that at every moment a man's whole life should be at stake. They were indeed `dead men on furlough', as Lenin had called them. Nothing could frighten them any more, nothing surprise them. They had given all they had. History had squee
zed them out to the last drop, had burnt them out to the last spiritual calorie; yet they were still glowing in cold devotion, like phosphorescent corpses.
In the generation that followed them, the generation of the Gletkins, a different type prevailed. Its mentality is wonderfully summed up in a statement by a young Soviet official, quoted by J. L. Bruckbergera:
`We are believers. Not as you are. We do not believe either in God or in men. We manufacture gods and we transform men. We believe in Order. We will create a universe in our image, without weaknesses, a universe in which man, rid of the old rags of Christianity, will attain his cosmic grandeur, in the supreme culmination of the species. We are not fighting for a regime, or for power, or for riches. We are the instruments of Fate.'
Yet it was neither the `dead men on furlough' of the Old Guard, nor the Gletkins of the next generation, who made the most lasting impression on me. At the time of my visit, the Soviet Empire occupied one-sixth of the inhabited earth; at present it occupies, directly or indirectly, one-third. It would have been impossible to hold such an immense realm together by terror alone. The apathy and passive acquiescence of the ruled, their selfdeceiving hopes and propaganda-fed illusions, facilitated the task of the. rulers, but could never have given sufficient coherence to that vast structure. The bureaucracy of Party and State, which represented roughly one-third of the total population, had, of course, a vested interested in defending the system; but the majority of this bureaucracy, on the lower grades of the pyramid, lived just as wretchedly and insecurely as those whom they ruled. There existed another human element which prevented the colossal machinery from breaking down into its component parts, which kept the creaking transmissions and the dry bearings somehow going. It was a certain category of men that I find difficult to define though I have a vivid impression of the various individuals who belonged to it. I can perhaps best describe them by quoting a Talmudic legend which I recently read in a novel (Manes Sperber's To Dusty Death). It is called `the legend of the thirty-six just men':
When I was a child, our Rabbis taught me that if the thirty-six men did not exist, mankind couldn't last a day, it would drown in its own wrongs. The thirty-six are not marked out by any rank or office. They cannot be recognised, they never yield their secret, perhaps they are not even aware of it themselves; and yet it is they who, in every successive generation justify our existence and who every day save the world anew.
I have met them on my travels in every part of the Soviet Union. Hadji Mir Baba was one of them. Colonel Anwar Umorzakov was another. Oragvilidze in Tiflis; the kultprop of the District of Merv; little Werner in Baku; the Secretary of the Party Committee in the Kharkov Institute for Physics; a young Komsomol girl in Moscow; an engineer in the Gorky Motor Car Factory; the woman doctor in Permetyab; a G.P.U. guard in a village in Kasakhstan; and so on. I could continue my list up to an approximate number of one hundred individuals whom I met in the course of one year of travels. So there must exist thousands, or even tens of thousands of them.
What did these individuals have in common? They were `not marked out by rank or office'. They had the most varied occupations. They were not fanatical supporters of the regime. They were the people who, when I was lost and despairing, restored my faith in the Soviet Union. They created around themselves little islands of order and dignity in an ocean of chaos and Absurdity. In whatever field they worked, their influence communicated itself to their surroundings. It is the ensemble of these human islands, dotted over the Soviet realm, which maintains its coherent structure and prevents it from disintegrating.
These men, whether Communists or not, are `Soviet Patriots' in the sense in which that word was first used in the French Revolution. They are neither heroes nor saints, and their civic virtues all go against the grain of the regime they serve. They are motivated by a grave sense of responsibility in a country where everybody fears and evades responsibility; they exercise initiative and independent judgment where blind obedience is the norm; they are loyal and devoted to their fellow-beings in a world where loyalty is only expected towards one's superiors and devotion only towards the State. They have personal honour and an unconscious dignity of comportment, where these words are objects of ridicule.
Though there are thousands of them, they are a small minority, and always the first victims of every new purge. Yet they do not die out. Those whom I met in Russia were mostly in their early thirties, and belonged to the post-revolutionary generation. Nowadays I again meet with the same type among the post-war Russian emigres, who belong to an even later generation. These upright, devoted, energetic and fearless men were and are the backbone of a regime that denies all the values for which they stand. As a commurust, I took their existence for granted, for I believed that they were the product of revolutionary education, that `new type of man' whose coming Marx had predicted. Today I realise that their existence is very nearly a miracle, that they became what they are not because, but in spite of that education--a triumph of the indestructible human substance over a de-humanising environment.
For the pressure of that environment seems almost irresistible--slow and steady like soil erosion, or the action of the tides. It results in that gradual thwarting of the mind which I have tried to describe, and is accompanied by an even more fatal corrosion of the spirit. It cuts man off from his metaphysical roots, from religious experience, from the `oceanic feeling' in all its forms. Cosmic awareness is replaced by social vigilance, perception of the absolute by brain-acrobatics. The result is a gradual dehydration of the soul, a spiritual dearth more frightening than the famine. In the United States where, for different reasons, a similar flight from the metaphysical, from the tragic facts of existence is taking place, the morticians endeavour to transform the dead, with lipstick and rouge, into horizontal members of a perennial cocktail party. In Soviet Russia the method is simpler: there are no funeral rites, death is stripped of its tragic grandeur and mystic implications, reduced to a mere statistical event. At a Writers' Congress in Moscow, after listening to countless speeches promising universal happiness in a brave new world, Andre Malraux asked suddenly: `And what about the child run over by a tram car?' There was a pained silence; then somebody said, amidst general approbation:
`In a perfect, planned socialist transport system there will be no accidents.'
I left Russia in the late summer 1933.
A few weeks before my departure, I was sitting on the terrace of the Cafe Metropole in Moscow, in a mood of suicidal depression. Inside the cafe the orchestra was playing a popular song of the period; its refrain, in German, ran something like this:
... If you love me, you must steal for me,
And tell me fairy tales of a happy land....
I had had three vodkas, and the last words of the song, together with the sentimental tune and my feeling of misery, had a hypnotic effect. They made me escape into a long day-drcam, a`fairy tale of a happy land' as the sloppy refrain had it, and the day-dream led me to an idea for a play. The idea was that a pair of scouts from an alien planet land on earth in search of colonising space for their overcrowded world. They explain that only happy planets have a cosmic right to exist, and give mankind a last chance to organise its happiness within three days--or else it will gently be put out of its miseries, and the earth turned to better use. Faced with this ultimatum, the government resigns, the opposition washes its hands of the issue, and the dilettantes take at last over, appointing a crazy poet called Glowworm to be Dictator o Happiness. And lo, it works, to everybody's surprise: money is abolished, authority is abolished, all taboos are smashed, all curtains raised. Alas, at the end of the three days it transpires that the scouts are impostors; and as there is no longer any need to be happy, the old order is restored and everybody goes back to his former miseries.
I began to write the play then and there, on the paper-napkins of the Cafe Metropole. It was, of course, an unforgivable heresy: `escapism' is almost the deadliest sin for a Communist, and I felt rather like a
schoolboy drawing obscene pictures on the blackboard all set for a solemn lesson in History. I finished the play in three weeks, the last act on the train that took me out of Russia. I called it Bar du Soleil. It was a play without literary pretensions, a flight from the pressure of reality, and I described it accordingly as `An Escapade in Four Acts'. It was to have a long and undistinguished stage career.
My last halt in the Soviet Union was, as the first had been, the Weissbergs' flat in Kharkov, where I again stayed for a week or two. We continued to play poker with dear old Professor Shubnikov. Five years later Professor Shubnikov was to testify before the G.P.U. as follows:
Weissberg came to the Institute from Germany in 1931, where he had been recruited by the Gestapo. His task was to organise sabotage and espionage. He tried to recruit me for his organisation, but as I had already been in the service of a German espionage organisation since 1924, I refused. From that time on we worked parallel but without contact with each other."